Terra's Victory (Destiny's Trinities Book 7) (7 page)

It was Boxing Day, so the thirteen floors of offices above the bunker were empty and that was a small blessing. The humans who worked there were safely out of this.

Through the smoke and dust came an outpouring of hounds and vampeen, their teeth bared, their eyes red and glowing through the dust. There were dozens of them, spilling out into the parking garage and farther, onto the street itself, in broad daylight, for the world to see.

They spread out, searching for prey, while sirens sounded in the near distance.

The cops, if there were enough of them, could slow and maybe even stop them, but only if they adjusted quickly enough to the reality there were creatures who could move faster than them, were stronger than them and wanted nothing more than to eat them….

Beth felt sick. “They have no idea what they’re dealing with.”

The image on the TV went back to the station anchor, who looked as ill as Beth felt. It was one of the little independent stations, that barely covered the whole of Manhattan. “Those images are quite real,” the anchor said calmly, “and we have reports of similar incidences across lower Manhattan. Now we take you live to Bruce Barry, on Wall Street. Bruce?”

“Hello?” Beth heard from the phone she held in her hand.

She lifted it to her ear. “Remmy, I’m sorry. The news just broke. They have footage of vampeen, hounds…it’s horrible. Tell me you’re back in Chihuahua?”

“Just arrived, ma’am,” he said, his slow voice calm and soothing. “My first call was to Alexander, that’s why the phone was busy.”

“I understand perfectly,” she assured him. “However, we’re all spread out to hell and gone now, so I’m having to cut across the usual communications channels. Rhys says you three were the last to leave?”

“I guess we were at that,” Remmy said. “I watched Rhys and his two jump away and I don’t remember seeing anyone else after that.”

“Thank you. You helped save hundreds of lives.”

“That’s our job, ma’am.”

“It is. I’m thanking you anyway. No one expected this. No one even conceived of such a bold move.”

“Such a public one, too.”

“Yes,” Beth agreed. “Octavia is your jumper, correct?”

“She is.”

“Please ask her to come to my apartment in Soho, as soon as she can. We’re having an informal meeting of the trinities and there’s only room for one from each trinity, so it will have to be the jumper. She was here once, just after we took down the Grimoré in Mexico. She’ll know the location.”

“I will.” He hesitated. “Was anyone…lost?”

Beth sighed. “Of the trinities, no. Twenty-seven others, though. Nineteen of them were elves, who lingered to take out those who could not jump for themselves.”

Lindal was watching her and Beth made herself look away from him.

Remmy sighed, too. His was heavy and gusty. “I’ll ask Octavia to step over at once. Good afternoon, Seaveth.”

She put the phone down.

“Nineteen?” Lindal said.

Zack looked up from the TV.

There was no way around this hard truth. “Yes,” Beth said flatly.

Lindal hung his head for a moment. When he looked up again, the blue of his eyes was intense. “This will drive them. They will be even more determined to close the portal, now.”

Zack watched Lindal, as if he was trying to measure him. Perhaps he was.

Beth had found it easier to refuse to think about the decision Lindal had to make. So now she waited passively, not trying to anticipate what he might say.

Instead, Zack spoke. “Hey,” he said quietly. He aimed the remote at the TV and jacked up the volume.

The CNN logo showed in the corner, with a red header at the top with RABID DOGS ON NY STREETS in white. “…reports of a group of wild dogs, possibly rabid, roaming the streets of lower Manhattan,” the anchor said smoothly. “Residents are advised to stay indoors and not approach the dogs. Animal Control and other authorities are on the scene and we are assured the situation is under control.” The camera angle switched and the anchor smiled. “Earlier today, Santa paid a visit to a group of lucky children in—”

Zack switched the TV off. “ABC, NBC, all the majors, are either not reporting it or not breaking in to report it. CNN are minimizing it.”

“Despite actual footage of hounds that look nothing like domestic dogs and vampeen that are neither?”

“I think,” Lindal said slowly, “they’re all waiting to see how the other stations spin it. The earlier one was a local and beneath notice in their estimation. They can laugh and call them hysterical, even accuse them of exaggerating to inflate their ratings. At the same time, none of the majors is going to be the first to say ‘supernatural’ because
they
don’t want to be laughed at, even if they know damn well it’s nothing natural out there.”

“It’s a giant game of chicken,” Beth breathed.

“First one to flinch loses, too,” Zack added.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been grateful about ratings wars until now,” Beth said. She got to her feet. “I need a shower in the worst way. Then, we’ll have to clear room for the trinities. They’re already on their way.”

* * * * *

With each trinity sending their jumper as their representative and with Zack and Lindal in the room, too, there were fourteen people squeezed into the tiny living space. Beth realized with a touch of shock that most of them were women and few of them human.

Mia had the one armchair in the room and a cushion behind her back. Everyone else sat or sprawled on the floor or leaned against a wall.

“I can’t guarantee we won’t be disturbed,” Beth told them. “It seems that the Grimoré are still drawn to us, especially when we gather in large numbers. It’s not just a forming trinity that beckons them. That is how they found the bunker. This may well be the last peaceful gathering of the trinities, so I want to make the most of it. From now on we will have to depend upon electronic communications, which the Grimoré do not seem to understand, and the telepathic conduits between each jumper in the group.”

Sera held up her hand. “Did everyone make it out, Beth?”

Beth sighed. Lindal didn’t react, even though she could feel the tension in him. “I’ll tell you what I’ve spent the last few hours sorting out. Cora, you can pass the information on to the Blackarcher clan and Camilla, the west coast clan. Octavia, Remmy will give you clan contacts for the Wildhammer clan, for you to keep them informed. Let me bring you up to date.”

She glanced at the laptop, reminding herself of the numbers.

“Who tells the elves?” Lindal asked.

Beth looked at him squarely. “I will.”

Sera was holding her hands together in her lap, the knuckles white. She said nothing.

Beth started in on the casualty list and gave a summary of the media reaction to the downtown basement explosion, which was received with incredulity.

“They’re pretending it didn’t happen?” Noemi asked. She was part of Beth’s sub-trinity and from Chicago. “With all the cellphone videos out there, they think they can get away with saying it’s rabid dogs?”

“It might hold for a while, until it blows up on the Internet and then the majors will have to cave,” Zack said quietly. “We don’t know what will happen after that.”

“Shouldn’t we warn them about the Grimoré, now?” Octavia asked. “If they’re warned, if they’re looking out for themselves, the Grimoré won’t be able to pick them off, like sheep in a pen.”

Beth made herself not look at Lindal. Or Sera, either. “The elves will not permit us to reveal ourselves, so we will have to let the chips fall as they may.”

Silence. Everyone looked at her, puzzled.

“So, we
don’t
warn them?” Octavia asked. There was anger in her voice.

“We need the elves,” Beth explained. “Without them, we will lose the war and they are very…sensitive about exposure.”

There were more puzzled glances, most of them toward Lindal. He didn’t react. He didn’t look at anyone, either.

“It’s not just the elves,” Noemi said. “Vampires would not be happy about wholesale exposure.” She was a vampire herself and also a director in Chicago’s city hall. She had a nuanced understanding of politics among humans and more. Beth didn’t doubt she was right.

“It’s not that we’re
sensitive
,” Noemi added. “After centuries of abuse and scorn and fear from humans, we’ve developed thicker hides than the elves. We didn’t get the luxury of hiding out on a different world. We had to live among those who feared us. That was long ago, when humans more easily believed the supernatural existed. Nowadays, we get to enjoy life passing as humans because humans believe so thoroughly that we are nothing more than myth. There are many vampires who would not appreciate losing their hard-won place among humans.”

Zack grimaced. He was agreeing silently with Noemi.

Beth cleared her throat. “I’m sure the shifters and demons and others would also be afraid of exposure, too. Only, the Grimoré care nothing for our media, if they even understand it. At first, they preferred secrecy so they could hunt and gather humans freely. That phase has ended now. They’ve demonstrated that revealing their existence to humans is immaterial to them now the end of the war is in sight.”

“How do we stay hidden, when the Grimoré are letting hounds and vampeen loose on the streets of our cities?” Cairo asked. He was the jumper from Sera’s trinity, in Florida.

“We can’t,” Beth said flatly. “The only way to stay hidden is to not fight them, to hide away where the cameras won’t find us. We can’t afford to do that. We
must
oppose them, wherever we find them.”

“What if we find them in the Galleria where every teenager has a cellphone?” Mia asked.

“Then that is where we find them and face them,” Beth said.

The little, astounded silence fell again.

Beth raised her hand, anticipating the response. “Think it through,” she urged. “There is so much garbage on the Internet, so much that is fake and unbelievable, that a few more videos of people fighting off mangy dogs and monsters with teeth, or even tall, pale people with big heads, will be dismissed by almost everyone as another click-bait video. The more of it on the Internet, the less inclined the major networks will be to touch the matter.” She leaned forward to press her point home. “As long as there is no one around for the media to question, afterward—if no one confirms
anything
, if no one speaks on behalf of anyone—then even if we are caught on those same cameras, it will continue to look unbelievable.”

“For how long?” Ekota asked sharply. “How long before the sheer number of incidences add up to conviction?”

“I have every expectation that the war will end long before we reach that point,” Beth said, with as much confidence as she could muster poured into her tone. “For now, we take the fight to wherever the Grimoré are, no matter where they are.”

Cora and Zoe and even Octavia looked doubtful.

“Zoe?” Beth pressed.

Zoe shifted, re-crossing her legs. “Ours is a small town, Seaveth. People know who we are. It’s not the same as fighting in the middle of Times Square and jumping away. People know where we live.”

“You’ll have to adapt to your situations, of course,” Beth told her. “Only, we do not shrink from engaging the Grimoré just because we fear exposure. We just don’t explain ourselves, either.”

* * * * *

The meeting ended inconclusively, with an air of discontentment, which bothered Beth more than she let Zack and Lindal see.

Exhaustion was dragging at her, so when the last coffee cup had been washed, she left Zack monitoring the cellphones and Lindal brooding by the window and went to bed.

It was a relief to lie down and curl up under the quilt. Yet sleep wouldn’t come. Tiredness was making her feet throb and her arms and legs ache. The bones of her face felt hot, as if she was coming down with a fever. Her mind wouldn’t quit. She kept turning the events of the last few hours, days…every slow year of the war, over and over in her mind.

What had she missed? Had she made a bad decision? Was her faith in the prophecy, which foretold an end to the war before Mia’s baby was born in early April, completely foolish?

She turned onto her other side and tossed the covers aside. She was too hot underneath them. Too worked up.

Beth didn’t know how long she laid there, her mind only now starting to prod and dig at secondary issues and concerns that would develop from the Grimoré attack. The meanings behind it. Things she really must remember to do when she next woke. Lindal’s dilemma. She didn’t know how much time passed while she failed to sleep because she refused to look at the clock. She kept her eyes shut. She was tired enough that it was easy to lie motionless and wish that sleep would take her.

She realized she had drifted into a very light doze when she felt soft warmth on her upper breast and realized it was a pair of lips.

Lindal’s scent was unmistakable. His head was just beneath her chin. He had eased himself onto the bed as she had lain there, not quite asleep.

“You’re far, far too wound up,” he breathed against her breast. “You’ll never sleep if we don’t get you relaxed enough.”

As he spoke, she felt Zack’s cool fingers on her shoulder, easing the tiny strap of her nightgown off her shoulder. The silk dropped over her arm and Lindal nudged the fabric lower, until her breast was exposed.

At the same time, Zack rolled her back. She thought he was lying her down on the bed on her back, except her shoulder came up against his chest. It opened her up to Lindal’s explorations.

“Mmm, that’s better,” Lindal breathed.

Zack slid his hand over her shoulder, down to capture her breast. The nipple was snagged between his fingers and he tugged, teasing her. At the same time, Lindal lowered himself down onto the sheet and sucked her other breast into his mouth.

Beth was still groggy with the need for sleep, which kept her in a completely relaxed state, accepting everything they were doing to her. The tugging on her breasts was delicious, a heated friction that drew her out of her sleep-filled thoughts.

They played with her breasts, teasing her, for long minutes. She woke properly, as her body stirred. Her breath escaped her in a little gasp. None of the thoughts that had been plaguing her could intrude now. She was focused fully upon the rush of sweet longing, the pounding ache of her clit.